I Drew Silly Faces and Won a Free iPad

Not too long ago the fine folks over at Design Festival put on a contest to highlight an interesting web technique with multiple repeating backgrounds and prime numbers with something known as the cicada principle (see the original article here – The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers by Alex Walker). It’s actually a fantastic concept that can result in some amazing, seemingly random, results that works perfectly when applied to web page backgrounds.

The contest itself ended on May 25th and the concept was simple: submit your own design (consisting of up to eight image layers) using the cicada principle discussed in article previously mentioned and let people vote on your entry by sending out a tweet via each entry page. When I found out that the prize was an iPad2 I thought the stars had aligned just for me, especially after almost but not quite winning an iPad2 at ValioCon just days earlier – see previous post, ValioCon2011: Reflections of Awesomeness, for more details about that.

Drawing Silly Faces = Win

I won this!

I had a blast making my designs for my entry in the contest and basically spent a day or so cracking up while drawing silly accessories and additions to my already drawn Twitter profile picture. Since the votes were based on tweets I turned to all my friends with an internet connection and you guys didn’t disappoint. My entry, “Blind Date Prep” , had by far the most votes once all the numbers had come in and a few weeks after officially winning, I ended up with a free 16gb iPad2 delivered to my door and I love it. Seriously you guys, your help winning the contest (*of those that voted) means so much to me and I really truly appreciate the help as well as the congrats since winning. And an extra special thanks is due to Design Festival for the contest prize. You guys rock.

Once the contest was over, another post appeared on Design Festival highlighting a handful of noteworthy entries as well as who was the winner (me) and I recommend checking it out – The Cicada Project: And the winner is…. I thought their little write-up about me was hilarious:

Alan is a Santa Barbara designer, illustrator and blogger whose super-​​power appears to be a talent for simple but oddball cartoon characters.

A Token of My Appreciation

I don’t really have a way to show just how much I appreciate everyone helping me win the contest so the best I could come up with is to offer a desktop background for download based on my entry design. Just click the below image to download the .ZIP file. It’s a 1920 x 1080 image so it should be big enough for a majority of monitor sizes. If you’d like to use the image but need it scaled to a smaller size for some reason then just let me know and I’d be happy to adjust as needed. Enjoy and thanks again!